Automated systems for printing and delivering money orders have been developed and used in the past with some measure of success by both financial institutions and retail outlets. These systems provide the basic systems and methods of providing the transaction data to a printer which holds blank financial instruments such as money orders. The blank money orders are stored in the printer in a secure fashion to prevent fraudulent creation of money orders. The presence of blank money orders in the printer makes the system very vulnerable to the fraudulent creation of money orders and to mistakes in the creation of money orders such as the creation of duplicate money orders due to printer malfunctions, user data entry errors or other system malfunctions.
The systems that have been developed for creating and delivering money orders in the past have been systems with dedicated hardware and little, if any, interface with other systems such as general accounting systems, other data processing facilities or back-up and recovery facilities. Integration of the delivery and creation of financial instruments is necessary to provide adequate security for these facilities and to allow for communication of these subsystems with supervisory systems such as host accounting systems.